All of this seems laughable to me. A one hour consulting fee
to David Copperfield and one could easily get as many World Records as
one wants. There are a million low tech ways to cheat that
would never be detected by a billion bits of PK cryptography.

Ultimately I believe by far the most effective way to
deter cheating is the rule mentioned in the 2005 IGC meeting
minutes whereby the FAI sporting license is permanently
revoked if cheating is proven.

The prospect of proving someone is a cheat and getting 15 minutes of
fame is so much more interesting than the WR itself, WRs will always
come under more scrutiny in ways never concieved by the IGC that
cheating will be very difficult to keep a secret.

Besides this, anyone following the advances solving Fermat's Last
Theorem or Primality knows that an NP=P proof isn't so farfetched.
PK has definitely not been proven uncrackable.
There is a good reason the DOD uses a combination of cryptography
AND physical security for its most secret messages.

The IGC focus on "improved" technology gets a big yawn from me.
But if it distracts the technophiles away from
modifying and complicating other (important) parts of the
sporting code, I support it completely!

In article ,
Andrew Warbrick wrote:
At 09:30 18 March 2005, Mottley wrote:

T o d d P a t t i s t wrote:
Ian Strachan wrote:

Which cryptographic algorithms are considered ``equivalent''
to
RSA?
What is the minimum key length prescribed?
DSA for one,
On key length, for a new type of recorder for IGC-approval
for 'all
flights' he answer is a private key of at least 512
bits.

This all seems to me to be roughly like putting a
bank vault
door on a house with windows. Yes, the door is better,
but
the thief's going to come through the window.

Public/private key cryptographic algorithms work like
this:
Alice has a secret key and uses it to send a message
to Bob.
Bob wants to make sure the message actually came from
Alice, so he uses the public key to decrypt and verify.
The
relationship between the public key and the private
key is
such that you can't determine the private key from
the
public key. Thus, Bob can be sure that the message
came
from someone who had the secret key, i.e., Alice and
not the
bad guy Snake, who does not have the secret key.

In the world of gliders, Alice is the Flight Recorder
and
has the secret key. Bob is the FAI and wants to make
sure
the message is really from the FR. The pilot submitting
the
igc trace is our Snake! However, since Snake owns
and
controls Alice (it's his flight recorder) all he has
to do
is open up Alice and get or use the secret key. I
just
don't see how you can stop this by going from 128
bit to 256
bit to 512 bit keys. Regardless of length, Snake
owns and
controls Alice.

Don't forget that Alice has a Chastity Belt!!! . ie
a physical security
switch wich will void the security of the Flight Recorder
when the case
is opened.



So let's say Snake is rich enough to afford two Alices.
He can sacrifice one Alice to find out all about where
the switch is, he now knows how to defeat the switch,
by cutting the case if necessary and has a nice clean
case from Alice 1 with which to rebuild Alice 2 having
done the dirty deed.





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Mark J. Boyd